Meet Mugatu: A steerable bipedal robot with a single motor

Simplifying the walk

"The first direction of the project was aimed at simplifying the way robots walk as much as possible," said James Kyle, a master's student in the mechanical engineering department at CMU. "Once we understand how scaling affects locomotion, it can be extremely useful for taking something that already exists and scaling it up or down to do things like fit through smaller pipes or carry more load."

The team led by Aaron Johnson and Sarah Bergbreiter, both professors of mechanical engineering at CMU, ended up revolutionizing the field of small robotics by building Mugatu, the world's first steerable bipedal robot.

Mugatu's design consists of two rigid bodies and one actuator, which is quite simplistic but still manages to achieve complex motions performed by other robots. Additionally, the robot is self-contained, can start walking independently, and is stable in its gait. The Mugatu can steer left or right or continue walking straight when required.

Next 'steps' for Mugatu

The work on the robot's sensor was performed by another student, Kendall Hart, who is pursuing an undergraduate degree at the university. The sensor calculates the energy the robot needs to walk a certain distance.

Engineering students are taught MATLAB, a programming and numeric computing language, in their theory classes. Still, Hart needed to apply this to solve a real-world problem he was facing with the project. "When we were working on implementing the current sensor, there was a lot of debugging there, but now it's made me more confident in debugging without my mentors," Hart said in a press release.

However, the team is far from the finish line for the project they refer to as The LEGO Project. As the name suggests, the team intends to shrink the robots' size until they are the size of a LEGO brick. Simplifying the walking action achieved with a single motor is a huge step in this direction.

When will we see such small robots in action? "It's going to take a while because the mechanics of everything changes as you start down-sizing," Hart added.

The research findings have been published on a pre-print server and have not been peer-reviewed.